No Evidence of Echo Chambers from Selective Exposure

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

For the Web tracking data, this focusses on visits to any on a list of news outlets, and from this determined how selective participants media diets were (in terms of time spent with left- or right-wing media. This also depends on a coding of the partisan slant of news media, of course, which was based on a combination of audience-based measures and expert judgment.

Partisan media diets were not particularly pronounced, and neither was selective exposure; if anything, selective exposure appeared to produce greater accuracy of people’s beliefs. The more media diets skewed to the right, however, the more inaccurate participants’ beliefs were – but this pattern applied only in the US.

The overall result of this analysis shows (yet again) that there is no evidence of ‘echo chambers’; selectivity has no impact on misbeliefs. Selectivity only had a strong effect in the US, and here it had different effects for the left (more accurate beliefs) and the right (less accurate beliefs) – this is a clear indication of the deep problems with the US’ right-wing media ecosystem.